Best Staged Plans

[a Novel]

As a professional home stager, Sandy Sullivan is an expert at transforming cluttered rooms into attractive houses ready for sale. If only reinventing her life were as easy as choosing the perfect paint color. She's eager to put her family's suburban Boston home on the market, to downsize, and to simplify her own life. But she must first deal with her foot-dragging husband and her grown son, who has moved back home after college to inhabit the basement "bat cave."

After reading them the riot act, Sandy takes a job staging a boutique hotel in Atlanta recently acquired by her best friend's boyfriend. The good news is that she can spend time with her recently married daughter, Shannon, in Atlanta. The bad news is that Shannon finds herself heading to Boston for job training, leaving Sandy and her southern son-in-law, Chance, as reluctant roommates. If that's not complicated enough, Sandy begins to suspect that her best friend's boyfriend may be seeing another woman on the side.

Filled with characters who are fresh and original, yet recognizable enough to live in your neighborhood--plus plenty of great tips and tricks for fixing up houses, and lives--this is a wise and witty story of letting go and moving on. Best Staged Plans is Claire Cook at her most humorous and heartfelt.

As a home stager myself, this book was a hilarious read! I loved that it had lots of laughs and also, great tips for staging! Fun vacation read with charming finish!

kaiserd
Jun 15, 2012

Another fun summer read from Claire Cook. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

countrykathy
Mar 08, 2012

I enjoyed the entire book and liked that she references current fads, TV shows, etc. A few times I even caught myself laughing out loud and read portions of it to my husband as well. A fun and light read.

I was enjoying this, and then a couple of the problems (particularly concerning a homeless woman) were resolved too quickly and easily, and after that I was fighting irritation and disbelief. Too bad, because there are a lot of good parts to this otherwise.

If I had one brilliant piece of advice for parents whose daughter is getting married, it would be to offer to contribute a specific amount of money to the cause. Then tell the happy couple they can keep whatever they don't spend. The early months of planning had been fraught with arguments about how much Shannon could pay for her dress and whether they could fly in a live band. Yes, a live band. The minute we told Shannon she could keep the change, _poof_, the fights went away.

I'm not sure I could have a true friendship with anyone who underscores every funny comment with LOL. It's ridiculous. If you have to cue someone to laugh out loud, you're simply not being funny enough.

The car in front of us was covered in about six inches of pollen. Just looking at it made me want to sneeze. I wondered if the bees even bothered pollinating flowers in the South, or if they just sat back and said _whatever_.